In a storage system configured of a storage device such as a disk array device, for example, if a firmware of a Fibre Channel switch (hereinafter referred to as an FC-SW) is upgraded, a coupling test (evaluation) is performed for an environment including the FC-SW. If a failure occurs in the storage system, the cause of the failure is analyzed by re-creating the situation where the failure has occurred.
Patent Citation 1 states that, if the cause of the failure that has occurred in a SAN (Storage Area Network) environment is hard to identify, analyzers are set, one between the server and an FC-SW, and the other between the FC-SW and the RAID system (RAID: Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks), by which the same environment is created as at the time of the failure and the cause of the failure is identified with reference to the analysis result by the analyzers, and that the data that passes through the FC-SW is accumulated in the FC-SW buffer as trace data, which is transmitted to storage devices when the requirements for trace data transmission are satisfied, such as no data frames existing in the SAN.